A galled crotch
Posted: November 13, 2024 Filed under: Texas Leave a comment
Reading at last J. Evetts Hayley’s biography of Charles Goodnight.
Querencia
Posted: November 3, 2024 Filed under: Mexico, sports Leave a comment
The first page of Proust: I woke up, and I never knew in the beginning where I was, so I went through all the bedrooms of my life. The way I think of it is like a Disney film. First, you think it was better when you were seven years old, and furniture looked a certain way. Then you think, no, it was best when you were twelve, so all the chairs dance around and restructure themselves into the bedroom you had when you were twelve. Finally, you reach your current age, and, here, they find their places in yet a different arrangement. Territorialization works in this way. In music, the refrain is making that home for yourself in music by territorializing sound through repetition.
What does it mean to have a home?
I don’t know whether any of you have seen bullfights; maybe you think they are horrible, or maybe you are interested in death, like Hemingway. In a bullfight, the bull emerges out into a world which is completely unfamiliar. The bull must then territorialize this world, so he finds a part of the bull ring—it’s arbitrary, because the space is all the same-which will be his terrain. In bullfighting language, this is called the querencia, from querer.
This space belongs to the bull. None of the actors in the bullfight, and especially not the matador, will ever try to get into that place. They have to identify it, because there the bull is supreme. They have to lure it out of its querencia in order to fight it in some other place. All of this is in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, his book on the bullfight. As he says, he was interested in the bullfight because, as a writer, he wanted to know what death was, and the bullfight often results in the deaths of the bulls and also of the mata-dors. But you can see the usefulness of understanding territorialization as your querencia, the way you naturalize, normalize, make your own space, space being understood in the sense of the plane of immanence, that is to say, the connections of all these things. Some are interests or pas-sions; some are objects, tasks, or habits. All that you organize into something which I guess you call your identity, but it isn’t your identity; it is your territorialization, and you are caught in it. For the infant, that will be the parents. Why do you think Deleuze and Guattari attack Freud and the Oedipus complex? Who wants to be caught with their parents their whole life?
You want to get away from them. Kristeva and Irigaray’s description of the mother:
You have to get away. You have to deterritorialize.
And now another crucial Deleuzean ex-pression: the line of flight. You must try to invent lines of flight out of your territory, because your territory is going to be taken over by Google, by General Motors, by Coca-Cola. It will lie in the globalized world of the great corporations. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. You can try to make a little space that you call your own, and that will be what Deleuze calls your secret garden.
that from Jameson’s Years Of Theory.
Dry Head and Bloody Bones
Posted: October 31, 2024 Filed under: America | Tags: writing Leave a commentAn American horror story for this Halloween:
On November 20, 1936, in Jacksonville, FL a WPA field worker named Rachel Austin interviewed a former enslaved person named Florida Clayton (she was given that name as the first in her family born in that state).
The rest of this story is too upsetting to reprint, it can be found in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, volume 17, Florida Narratives, reprinted 1972. Or here.
Dry Head and Bloody Bones. If you go poking into American history you’ll find some scary stuff!
Be safe out there this Halloween! 🎃
I doubt it but I’d like to meet him
Posted: October 30, 2024 Filed under: hely | Tags: Helys Leave a comment
Or her!
Ballot
Posted: October 29, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition 2 Comments
Donald Trump is pure toxicity, he tried half-seriously to end the peaceful transfer of power, he’s beyond unacceptable. We endorse native daughter of the Golden State Kamala Harris and hope that a special Providence continues to look after children, drunks, and the United States.
I put this together for my own use, perhaps it is useful to you, much cribbed from The LA Times. I’ll be voting in person in a few days so feel free to make a strong case I am open to persuasion on city, state and county measures.
Community College, Seat 1: Andra Hoffman
Community College, Seat 3: David Vela
Community College, Seat 5: Nichelle Henderson
Community College: Seat 7: Kelsey Iino
US Rep: Laura Friedman
City Measure DD: Yes
City Measure HH: Yes
City Measure II: Yes
City Measure ER: Yes
City Measure FF: Yes (on the fence here, it’s expensive, but I go with Mayor Bass)
City Measure LL: Yes
Uni Measure US: Yes
District Attorney: Nathan Hochman (both bad options here, voting to express disgust.)
It makes me a little mad that I have to vote for judges. I found this helpful.
Judge No 39: Steve Napolitano
Judge No. 48: Ericka Wiley (I don’t see anything wrong with Renee Rose)
Judge No. 97: Sharon Ransom
Judge No. 135: Steven Yee Mac (nothing wrong with Georgia Huerta)
Judge No. 137: Tracey Blount
County Measure G: Yes
County Measure A: Yes
My inclination is to vote against any state ballot propositions, it’s part of why our state is so wacky, but we exist within a context of everything that came before, so vote we must:
State Measure 2: Yes
State Measure 3: Yes
State Measure 4: Yes
State Measure 5: Yes
State Measure 6: Yes
State Measure 32: No
State Measure 33: No
State Measure 34: Yes (LA Times disagrees here)
State Measure 35: No
State Measure 36: No
(source on that photo)
Years of Theory
Posted: October 25, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, everyone's a critic Leave a comment
Here’s an anecdote. One of Sartre’s closest friends in school was Raymond Aron, a conservative, pro-American political scientist. In those days, the French government had scholarships to various foreign countries. They started a whole French school in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss himself taught in that school and his early work is the result of that contact with Brazil. Roland Barthes taught on this scholarship in Egypt, because the French had a teaching fellowship in Cairo. There was one in Berlin, and when Aron had just gotten back he said, “There’s this thing called phenomenology. What does it mean?” He is sitting in a cafe with Sartre and Beauvoir, and Aron says, “What it means is: you can philosophize about that glass of beer.” Suddenly, the whole idea that phenomenology allowed one to think, write, and philosophize about elements of daily life transforms everything. As historically reconstructed by participants, the drink turns out to have been a crème de menthe, but that doesn’t matter too much. That’s the lesson that these people got from phenomenology, and that’s what seems to me to set off this immense period of liberation from philosophy, a liberation toward theory.
What is postmodern? Structuralist? When someone’s making a Marxist critique of like semiology, what’s happening?
Deluze. Sartre. Levi-Strauss. Lacan. Barthes. Foucault: who were these guys? what’s up here? What is the meaning of these names both as signifiers and signified and as referent?
Theory, structuralism, might not sound important. Academic stuff. Easy to dismiss. But guess what? Theory Thought has real, practical, worldly impact. These ideas are powerful.
The great sentence is not pronounced by Sartre but by Simone de Beauvoir: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” 8 You aren’t born a woman: you become a woman. You are constructed and you construct yourself as a woman.
Interrogating, politicizing, gendering, queering, these are Theory ideas. Lived experience. My truth. The fathers of both Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg were Theory-adjacent professors, does that have any meaning? And DJT? The Theorists would say of course, a media figure whose words have no meaning and every meaning? who cannot be taken literally or seriously yet must only be taken literally and seriously? who seems to break reality by his very existence? create experiences across which no translation is possible? That was exactly what we’re talking about. This was the inevitable outcome. Don’t be mad at us for calling it.
Anxiety is: you can’t be free, and you can’t really be authentic, unless you feel anxiety. The French word is angoisse, so the translator is tempted to use the word “anguish,” which is the false friend, the immediate cognate of angoisse. Anguish, that makes it too metaphysical. In French, angoisse is an everyday word. At least angoissé( e). It means, I don’t have any cigarettes—can I go out? I’m waiting for a phone call. Then you’re angoissé( e). That doesn’t mean you’re in anguish, like one of the saints. It just means you have anxiety, and anxiety is an everyday experience.
Making thoughts actions, and words tools of power. Now, Theory would argue, twas ever thus we’re just pointing it out. Language has always been a tool of power. (But Theory would say that, wouldn’t it?)
Karl Marx was a Theorist. The master Theorist. His theory infected and took over huge portions of the world. Many millions died. There are places named after Karl Marx in Cuba Vietnam Russia China etc. All that from a theory he worked out over pints at a pub after doing his reading at The British Museum.
The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought aka Postwar French Thought to the Present by Frederic Jameson may be one of the highest value books I ever bought. It is dense. But it’s less dense than Jameson’s other books, because it is transcripts of the guy talking.
If you’re very good at skipping/skimming huge parts of books, it’s fantastic. The drag may be sections where the ideas are so big, weird, vague or complicated that this reader found themself often saying “ok I’m moving on here because my mind is already blown and my circuits are fried.”
Now let’s look at this from a different point of view. We have said that each of these philosophical periods—Greece, the Germans, and now the French—are characterized by a problematic, but a changing problematic, a production of new problems. This is, in effect, Deleuze’s whole philosophy, the production of problems. But, if you put it that way, if you say philosophy’s task is the production of problems, what problems could there be if philosophy has come to an end? These problematics always end up producing a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive.
The book functions pretty well as a history of France since WW2. Jameson quotes Sartre talking about the Occupation:
Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. We were insulted to our faces every day and had to remain silent. We were deported en masse as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Everywhere—on the walls, on the movie screens, in the newspapers—we came up against the vile, insipid picture of ourselves our oppressors wanted to present to us. Because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. Because we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.
On the power and demise of the French Communist party:
The minute Mitterrand includes them in his government, they disappear. That’s the end of the Communist Party. After 1980, the Party is nothing. Of course, it is even less than nothing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There is still a Communist Party in France, of course, but its power is broken. Mitterrand’s political act here is a very cunning tactic of cooptation, which does them in as rivals to his socialist government, which itself ends up being not very socialist. But, in this period, the Party is a presence; it can irritate all these intellectuals. They revolt against it in various ways.
An idea: Theory begins for real after Camus. Camus says, man’s search for meaning? Forget it. No meaning. You’re pushing a rock up a hill. It’s absurd. Consider Sisyphus happy, live, move on.
Theory maybe says, sure ok but what even is Being? What is it that “we” (?) are experiencing? Jameson:
I’m alive in this moment when the sun is dying, or when climate change is destroying the planet, so many years from the big bang. So also with the body. I have a tendency to fat. Okay, that’s my situation. But I have to live that in some way. I have to choose that. So I keep dieting; I keep struggling against it. Or I let myself go completely. Or I become jolly like Falstaff. We are not free not to do something with this situation. Freedom is our choice of how we deal with it, but we have to deal with it, because it is us. But it’s not us in the way a thing is a thing. We are not our body. We are our body on the mode of not being it. We want people to understand that we are different, that we have a personality, that we’re not exactly what our body seems.
Here’s another one:
Everything we are we have to play at being, even if we don’t feel it that way. That’s a social function, so, of course, you have to rise to the occasion and play at being that social function.
Terry Eagleton, reviewing the book in the LRB, says:
and:
Theory was a big Yale and Duke and Brown thing. There was some of it at Harvard, but it’s not so easy to buy Theory when you remember Cotton Mather and John Adams and John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
I once interviewed an East German novelist who was quite interesting at the time, and we asked him the then-obvious question: “How much of an influence did Faulkner have on you?” As you know, after the war, all over the world, it is the example of Faulkner that sets everything going, from the Latin American boom to the newer Chinese novel. Faulkner is a seminal world influence at a certain moment. But what does that mean, “Faulkner’s influence”? So he said, “No, I never learned anything from Faulkner—except that you could write page after page of your novel in italics.”
Any time Jameson says “here’s a story for you” or “start with a bit of biography” I perk up. What would the narratologists say about that? Why are stories so addictive? So much more popular than Theory? To answer those questions would be to Theorize stories. Should you spend your time Theorizing stories? Or telling stories?
Why is this detail included in Jameson’s Wikipedia page?:
Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939 (about USD$1130 in 2024)).[12][15]
Church & state
Posted: October 23, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentFrom 1940 to 2000 — through rock ’n’ roll, through the sexual revolution — an eerily stable 70-ish per cent of Americans belonged to a church. From the millennium, that share started collapsing to what is now less than half.
Janan Ganesh in FT. He’s trying to reason through why every US election ends up 50/50.
The stabilisation of the west after 1945 is really a story of dominant parties, such as the Conservatives in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the right in France and to some extent the Democrats in the US, who ran Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. The ascendant party could afford to be magnanimous, while the other had every incentive to appeal beyond its base. Veering too far from the centre brought Goldwater-style annihilation. Competition between equals is beautiful in theory. In practice? Well, how edifying have you found the past couple of decades?
(is that true?)
Stinkards and Suns of Mississippi
Posted: October 19, 2024 Filed under: Mississippi Leave a comment
This is a description of the Natchez people, found in:
Southern Union State Junior College’s loss is my gain.
Optimal outcome: to be a hot Stinkard?
The source for this information is the Histoire de la Louisiane set down by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who had an adventurous life, including time spent among the Natchez around 1720-1728:
A dance:
Du Pratz (or Le Page’s) book was translated into English, and a copy was loaned by Benjamin Barton:
to Meriwether Lewis to take on his expedition with his bro Clark.
The Natchez people had a tough history. At the Michigan State Vincent Voice Library, there are some audio samples recorded in the 1930s of Watt Sam, one of the last native speakers of Natchez (or Natche) telling stories in the language. Regrettably these don’t seem to be available online. If anyone in the Lansing area can check it out for us, we’d be appreciative. It’s not urgent.
An intriguing aspect of the Natchez language was “cannibal speech”:
Traditionally the Natchez had certain stories that could only be told during the winter time, and many of these stories revolved around the theme of cannibalism. Protagonists in such stories would encounter cannibals, trick cannibals, marry the daughters of cannibals, kill cannibals, and be eaten by cannibals. In these stories Natchez storytellers would employ a special speech register when impersonating the cannibal characters. This register was distinct from ordinary Natchez by substituting several morphemes and words for others.
Sometimes I wonder if the linguists make too much of this stuff, when it was really just the Natchez doing spooky voices in their scary story.
Drop the Trop
Posted: October 10, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, archaeology, architecture Leave a commentThey imploded The Tropicana in Las Vegas, clearing room for a potential future stadium for the former Oakland As.
The strangeness of The Tropicana had my fascination.
Doomed for a long time, it was near vacant inside, adding to the odd effect.
On a visit to Las Vegas a couple years ago for Badlani’s birthday I took a walk through there. I was certain I’d taken a set of photos of the place, but today I couldn’t find them. The problems of archiving and curating remain, maybe even more challenging, in the age of infinite photos. What happened to them? Did I delete them as unsatisfactory? Are they lost in the cloud?
I can reconstruct some of the atmosphere from found pieces. Those above are from UK site Freedom Destinations. Here’s one from Oyster.com:
Those strange white couches. The Tropicana seemed like it had given up years ago, and yet the whites were kept close to spotless. A bleached aesthetic. The place was like a 1960s idea of the 1990s, or a 1990s idea of the 1960s. A coherent incoherence.
I find a fine set of photos of the lost Tropicana at, of course, reddit/r/LiminalSpaces:
The most times I ever heard the word “liminal” was in a debate between two professors that broke out during Sue Bell’s masters’ presentation in public art.
Strangely, for whatever reason the one photo of The Tropicana my phone seems to have preserved is this one:
The Gentleman of Elvas
Posted: October 9, 2024 Filed under: Florida Leave a comment
“Hernando de Soto was the son of an esquire of Xeréz de Badajoz, and went to the Indias of the Ocean sea, belonging to Castile, at the time Pedrárias Dávila was the Governor. He had nothing more than blade and buckler: for his courage and good qualities Pedrárias appointed him to be captain of a troop of horse, and he went by his order with Hernando Pizarro to conquer Peru.” The words are those of a Portuguese knight known only as the Gentleman of Elvas, a witness to and survivor of the long and agonizing disaster that was de Soto’s Florida enterprise.
The Gentleman of Elvas is one of several members of that expedition whose accounts have come down to us, and his was the first to be published, in 1557.
An English translation by the geographer Richard Hakluyt appeared in 1609, and there were other English editions in 1611 and 1686, as well as Spanish and French versions in the seventeenth century; so there was never any question of the work’s inaccessibility. Another account, by Luis Hernández de Biedma, remained unpublished until 1857, while that of de Soto’s secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, has never appeared except in severely abridged form. The most extensive work on the expedition, known as The Florida of the Inca, was written by a man born just a month before de Soto first set foot in Florida: Garcilaso de la Vega, known as “the Inca” because his mother, Chimpa Ocllo, had been a princess of Peru. (His father, Don Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, had seen action with the Pizarros during the Spanish conquest of Peru.) Garcilaso, an attractive and complex figure who spent most of his life in Spain but who was fiercely proud of his royal Inca ancestry, published his book on de Soto at Lisbon in 1605. His chief sources were the oral recollections of an anonymous Spaniard who had marched with de Soto, and the crude manuscripts of two other eyewitnesses, Juan Coles and Alonso de Carmona.
From these Garcilaso wove a lengthy and vivid history, long thought to be largely fantastic, but now recognized as a trustworthy if somewhat romantic narrative. Its chief concern to us is the detailed descriptions it provides of Indian mounds of the Southeast.
De Soto had served with distinction in Peru. He fought bravely against the Incas, and acted as a moderating influence against some of the worst excesses of his fellow conquerors. The darkest action of that conquest-the murder of Atahuallpa, the Inca Emperor-took place without de Soto’s knowledge and despite his advice to treat the Inca courteously. He shared in the fabulous booty of Peru and in 1537 came home to Spain as one of the wealthies men in the realm. Seeking some tract of the New World that he could govern, he applied to the Spanish king, Charles V, for the region now known as Ecuador and Colombia. But Charles offered him instead the governorship of the vaguely defined territory of “Florida,” which had lapsed upon the disappearance of Pánfilo de Narvez. By the terms of a charter drawn up on April 20, 1537, de Soto obligated himself to furnish at least 500 men and to equip and supply them for a minimum of eighteen months.
In return, he would be made Governor of Cuba, and upon the conquest of Florida would have the rank of Adelantado of Florida, with a domain covering any two hundred leagues of the coast he chose. There he hoped to carve out a principality for himself as magnificent as that obtained by Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru.
In the midst of de Soto’s preparations, Cabeza de Vaca turned up in Mexico, and at last revealed the fate of Narvez’ expedition. De Soto invited Cabeza de Vaca to join his own party, but he had had enough of North America for a while, and went toward Brazil instead. De Soto collected men, sailed to Cuba, and recruited more men there. His reputation had preceded him from Peru; he was thought to have the Midas touch, and volunteers hastened to join him. He gathered 622 men in all, including a Greek engineer, an English longbowman, two Genoese, and four “dark men” from Africa. In April of 1539 they departed for Florida.
The expedition entered Tampa Bay a month later, and on May 30 de Soto’s soldiers began going ashore. Their object was to find a new kingdom as rich at Atahuallpa’s, and it seems strange that they would have begun the quest in the same country where Narváez had found only hardship and death.
From Mound Builders of Ancient America: Archaeology of a Myth (1968) by Robert Silverberg, who writes more vividly on de Soto than many a de Soto specialist. You can read all of the Gentleman of Elvas account here, it ain’t exactly Tom Clancy. Silberberg picks up:
had de Soto been gifted with second sight, he would have sounded the order for withdrawal at that moment, put his men back on board the ships, and returned to Spain to fondle his gold for the rest of his days. Thus he would have avoided the torments of a relentless, profitless, terrible march over 350,000 square miles of unexplored territory, and would have spared himself the early grave he found by the banks of the Mississippi. This was no land for conquerors. But a stroke of bad luck, in the guise of seeming fortune, drew de Soto remorselessly onward to doom. His scouts, while fighting off the Indian ambush, had been about to strike one naked Indian dead when he began to cry in halting Spanish, “Do not kill me, cavalier! I am a Christian!” He was Juan Ortiz of Seville, a marooned member of the Narvez expedition, who, since 1528, had lived among the Indians, adopting their customs, their language, and their garb. He could barely speak Spanish now, and he found the close-fitting Spanish clothes so uncomfortable that he went about de Soto’s camp in a long, loose linen wrap. He seemed precisely what de Soto needed: an interpreter, a guide to the undiscovered country that lay ahead.
Unhappily, Ortiz knew nothing of the country more than fifty miles from his own village, and each village seemed to speak a different language.
Nevertheless, the Spaniards proceeded north along Narvez’ route, looking for golden cities. Ortiz spoke to the Indians where he could and arranged peaceful passage through their territory. Where he could not communicate with them, the Spaniards employed cruelty to win their way—a cruelty that quickly became habitual and mechanical. The Indians were terrified of the Spaniards’ horses, for they had never seen such beasts before. With the Spaniards there came also packs of huge dogs, wolfhounds of ferocious mien.
Wolfhounds of ferocious mien.
That illustration, by Herb Roe, I find on de Soto’s Wikipedia page. Here’s a Herb Roe evocation of the Kincaid Site in Illinois:
Here is Herb Roe’s website.
Tampa’s on my mind today as its about the get wrecked by Hurricane Milton.
Prayers up for the Cigar City.
Source for that map of de Soto expedition is the Florida Historical Society. Winds tracker from earth.nullschool.net.
Related matters: Cahokia.
Robert Coover
Posted: October 8, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, baseball, writing 1 Comment
The postmodernist Robert Coover died at 92. The Universal Baseball Association is the only one of his I’ve read. This is how the NYT describes it in Coover’s obituary:
Mr. Coover’s many other books included “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” (1968), about an accountant who invents a fantasy-baseball game and is driven mad by it
That’s accurate enough I guess. I loved reading the book. It’s the only one of Coover’s I read, and although it’s sort of fantastical, the plot’s kinda straightforward and the setting is vivid and lived-in. I went looking for the back cover copy that was on my old edition:
He eats delicatessen.
In new editions that’s updated to “take-out,” a mistake in my opinion. I remember Fener laughing out loud when he read that off the back cover when he found it in my office. The term “b-girl” was also dated by the time I read it, it seemed to mean something like this.
Spoiler below as I recall the plot:
Waugh is playing out a season of a dice based fantasy baseball game of his own invention. A star player, a wonderful pitcher, freakishly good emerges, and Henry comes to love him. Then one night he rolls the dice and can’t believe the outcome. The player is killed by a pitch. Henry can’t believe it. It shatters his world. It seems to be sort of a metaphor for God and Jesus (J. Henry Waugh/Yahweh).
The idea of going home to your own private world was on my mind at the time I read the book, when I was a young single man in LA, I’d leave work at 6pm or whatever and walk home to my one bedroom apartment and read or work on writing scripts or novels. It spoke to me, and what spoke to me about it wasn’t the postmodernism (in fact the metaphorical stuff kinda made me roll my eyes) but the realism, the portrait of a life, the investment and absorption into a private entertainment, the sadness and loss of having the game shattered.
So, salute to Robert Coover.
Next time I’m in Omaha
Posted: October 7, 2024 Filed under: America, the American West Leave a comment
Memphis/Atlanta
Posted: September 30, 2024 Filed under: memphis 2 Comments
Had a chance to see Memphis from 34k feet the other day on my way to Atlanta to show Common Side Effects at SCAD Animation Fest.
You can orient off the Bass Pro Pyramid there.
Spending a week living out of The Peabody Hotel in Memphis some years ago, now that was a special treat. A chopped chicken sandwich from Charlie Vergos’ Rendevous, enjoyed with a nice red wine while sitting in the lobby observing the ducks and the people? The ducks are tamer!
Well anyway after passing Memphis we flew right into the swirl of Helene.
Flying into a hurricane is a solved problem I guess, no one even fussed too much.
When the rain cleared up saw enough of Atlanta to conclude: I like it! Seems like a place where a person could just vibe.
At Videodrome took a photo of a movie I’d like to see:
1st Australian Division
Posted: September 28, 2024 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
The 1st Australian Division was thrown in at Pozières on the Somme in mid July 1916 repeatedly to attack a high ridge. The Australians came out on September 4, having suffered 23,000 casualties. The Australian Official History could not hide its disdain and anger afterward:
To throw the several parts of an army corps, brigade after brigade … twenty times in succession against one of the strongest points in the enemy’s defence, may certainly be described as “methodical,” but the claim that it was economic is entirely unjustified.
(That’s from Eksteins, Rites of Spring.)
from Wikipedia:
Throughout the course of the war, the division suffered losses of around 15,000 men killed and 35,000 wounded, out of the 80,000 men that served in its ranks.
Frank Hurley took the above photograph, which I found at the Wiki page for 1st Australian Division. Frank Hurley was busy in the 19teens. Two years earlier he was in Antarctica taking this one, of The Endurance:
Frank Hurley also took extensive photographs in the Pacific, including Papua New Guinea:
Back to Antarctica, here is Blizzard the pup.
Slam on California
Posted: September 24, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
At the end of July 1914, Rupert Brooke, alarmed by the heightening European crisis, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh, “And I’m anxious that England may act rightly.” But what did it mean to “act rightly”? Another letter, a few days later, in which Brooke described an outing into the countryside, hinted in a general way at his own response to this question:
I’m a Warwickshire man. Don’t talk to me of Dartmoor or Snowden or the Thames or the lakes. I know the heart of England. It has a hedgy, warm bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little hills, and all the roads wiggle with pleasure. There’s a spirit of rare homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, unec-centric yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle.. Of California the other States in America have this proverb: “Flowers without scent, birds without song, men without honour, and women without virtue” — and at least three of the four sections of this proverb I know very well to be true. But Warwickshire is the exact opposite of that. Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no such larks as ours, and no such nightingales; the men pay more than they owe; and the women have very great and wonderful virtue, and that, mind you, no means through the mere absence of trial. In Warwickshire there are butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night…
Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a country!’
Aware of his sentimentality he went on to say, “This is nonsense,”
North Hollywood flooded, 1938
Posted: September 23, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
I found that here, it’s at the UCLA Digital Collection.
In the early 19th century, the river turned southwest after leaving the Glendale Narrows, where it joined Ballona Creek and discharged into Santa Monica Bay in present Marina del Rey. However, this account is challenged by Col. J. J. Warner, in his Historical Sketch of Los Angeles County:
“…until 1825 it was seldom, if in any year, that the river discharged even during the rainy season its waters into the sea. Instead of having a river way to the sea, the waters spread over the country, filling the depressions in the surface and forming lakes, ponds and marshes. The river water, if any, that reached the ocean drained off from the land at so many places, and in such small volumes, that no channel existed until the flood of 1825, which, by cutting a river way to tide water, drained the marsh land and caused the forests to disappear.”
Presidential Dad Trivia
Posted: September 21, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(source)
George W. Bush, interviewed by David Rubinstein of the Carlyle Group in his book The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency.
This is not accurate. There was Joseph Kennedy:
who outlived three of his sons. Nathaniel Fillmore lived to be 91, and saw all of son Millard’s presidency. George Harding outlived son Warren, he died in Santa Ana, California.
In his biography of Warren G. Harding, Charles L. Mee describes Tryon Harding as “a small, idle, shiftless, impractical, lazy, daydreaming, catnapping fellow whose eye was always on the main chance”.
The W. Bush interview is frustrating to those of us who think he ruined everything:
How about this:
Well, I’m glad it was nice for you. (Genuinely, I am. The guy has charm, despite the catastrophes. What does that tell us? How can we profit from knowing that a president will come along the consequences of whom are awful and we still are lured in?)
W. does seem to take some responsibility here, on the bank bailouts:
W. Bush seems like a guy who says, well, I made the best decision under the circumstances and then shrugs at the consequences. That was the vibe I got from his book, Decision Points. Just because the consequences are appalling, doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. They no doubt taught him that at Harvard Business School.
In his Miller Center interview, Karl Rove tells a story from the transition meeting with Bill Clinton:
Riley
So this was the one personal thing. Who came up with the line, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible”?
Rove
Him.
Riley
Him?
Rove
Yes. As he’s also the author—He stole the idea—of “compassionate conservatism.” When we saw Clinton after the election, he said [imitating Clinton], “When I heard you say that phrase, ‘compassionate conservatism,’ George, I knew we were in deep trouble. That’s brilliant, it was just brilliant.”
W communications guy Dan Bartlett tells another:
When they had their transition meeting, as always happens, he asked him. “How’d you get better at it?” Clinton said, “Two things. First, you’re going to give a lot of speeches, so just practice. Practice more than anything else is going to make you better. Secondly, I learned how to take my time and to pause.” He told him a trick. He said, “On every other sentence or maybe every third sentence, it was one or the other, when I hit a period I would count in my head—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—before I’d read the next sentence. It will be hard for you to pull that off, because it feels like an eternity.”
I don’t know if you’ve done public speaking. I do it now. To master the pause, which Clinton now is brilliant at. He said, “Pacing is everything in speechwriting.” So he took that to heart. He took it, but what Clinton was good at, which Bush was never good at, was that while he was not a gifted speaker, he was an authentic communicator. It was always up to us to make sure that he really believed—Clinton could make the signing of a post office bill like the Gettysburg Address. He could take anything and at a moment’s notice turn it around. You knew when Bush was mailing one in.
San Francisco (and California) Politics
Posted: September 15, 2024 Filed under: California, San Francisco, the California Condition Leave a comment
When former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa lost a campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles in June, then-Speaker Robert Hertzberg named him to the California Medical Assistance Commission, where he could earn $99,000 a year, plus benefits, working a few hours each month.
Former Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, D-Los Angeles, who served in the legislature with Senate President Pro Tem John Burton in the 1970s, was out of public office and the target of a federal corruption probe two years ago when Burton placed him on the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. His salary: $114,180 a year plus benefits.
from SF Gate, 2002.
Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.
Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year. After Harris resigned from the unemployment board last week, Brown replaced her with Philip S. Ryan, a lawyer and longtime friend and business associate.
Last week, Brown also appointed Janet Gotch, wife of retiring Assemblyman Mike Gotch of San Diego, to the $95,000-a-year Integrated Waste Management Board, which oversees garbage disposal in California.
from Los Angeles Times, 1994. In fairness sitting through those hearings is probably very boring!
The story goes that in 2015 Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, maybe encouraged by various Democratic fundraisers and power brokers, cut a deal where she would run for Senate and he would run for Governor in 2018:
The early-2015 understanding between the two San Francisco Democrats, both with campaigns managed by the same San Francisco political consulting firm, was this: To avoid a brutal fight over the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Barbara Boxer, Newsom would stay out of the 2016 Senate race and concentrate on running for governor two years later.
A LA Times article about the story that Gavin Newsom might be unhappy with subsequent developments (it’s not over yet Gavin!) led me to this 2015 article about why San Francisco has produced so many prominent state leaders. It’s a question we’ve pondered before:
There is nothing mysterious about San Francisco’s export of high-profile politicians, nothing like the alchemy of air and water that produces the distinctive tang of its signature sourdough bread.
Simply put, it’s fierce competition, at virtually every level, starting with the leadership of its political clubs and spreading to the lowliest contests for elected office on up to races for the Legislature and Congress.
Where San Diego and Los Angeles lie back, most of their residents scarcely interested in politics, San Francisco leans in: chin out, elbows wide and sharp.
“There is a culture here of fighting over just about everything in the public space,” said Eric Jaye, another of the city’s veteran political strategists, from global issues like the Middle East to protecting the neighborhood coffee shop from an onslaught of franchised beans….
from earlier in the same piece (by Mark Z. Barabak):
San Francisco is the closest thing to an East Coast enclave set along the Pacific, a place, like New York or Boston, where politics is a passion, a sport, something everyday people fuss and fight and scheme over.
As blue (politically) as San Francisco Bay, the city has 27 officially chartered Democratic Party chapters, among them the Raoul Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club, the Filipino American Democratic Club, the Black Young Democrats of San Francisco and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. That works out to roughly one party franchise every few blocks.
There are countless more neighborhood councils, civic associations, interest groups — branches of the Sierra Club, the NAACP and the like — all clamoring for their particular agendas.
“It’s a city where people have always been able to be loud and proud about who they are, not just as individuals but as a group or a community,” said Ace Smith, a Democratic strategist who has decades of experience running San Francisco campaigns.
The result is a kind of hyper-democracy and political forge that has fashioned some of California’s most powerful and enduring elected leaders, in numbers far out of proportion to the city’s relative pint size.
A very short history of California’s politics might go something like this: California wanted to get into the union without going through the territorial stage, so they sorta rushed through a constitutional convention (John Sutter himself was there). In the compromise of 1850, one of the deals involving slave and free states, California got brought in. The US wanted a lock on that gold. During the Civil War California stayed in the Union (barely). After the Civil War, the major power in the state was the railroad barons, the Big Four, who were so powerful that they provoked a progressive, democratic backlash, personified by Hiram Johnson.
(He looks like Dwight Shrute, no?)
Here’s Reagan’s guy Stuart Spencer talking about Hiram:
They didn’t do a lot of candidate work, but they did a lot of what we call proposition work in California. Under the reforms of Hiram Johnson, we were a unique state at that time. We were for years. You could put practically anything on the ballot and have it decided there instead of the legislature.
You can also read Leon Panetta, who began as a Republican but became a prominent Democrat, talking about Hiram:
I was raised in a progressive Republicanism that used to be the case in California. It began with Hiram Johnson. It was a tradition that was carried on by people like Earl Warren and Tom Kuchel, whom I worked for, and Goodwin Knight and others. Because of cross filing, because of the traditions of California.
As a result of all this balloting California politics gets pretty complicated. Our state constitution is 76,930 words long. Novel length. (Although it’s not even close to the length of the longest, which is…. can you guess it?….
Alabama, at over 402,000 words. Gotta look into how that came to be. Seems to be because it makes a lot of specific rules for specific municipalities.)
At the moment we’re a one party state, probably because the second to last Republican governor, Pete Wilson, made his big issue immigration (anti). He actually won big on that, with Proposition 187 in 1994. The voters went for that in a big way, but it then got tied up in the courts, and the next Democratic governor, Grey Davis, stopped pursuing the implementation.
Noting a rapid increase in the number of Latinos voting in California elections, some analysts cite Wilson and the Republican Party’s embrace of Proposition 187 as a cause of the subsequent failure of the party to win statewide elections.
California today is maybe 26% immigrants. The most recent Republican governor was an immigrant. He won after Grey Davis was recalled (a Hiram Johnson reform). We might be tempted to treat that election as a special circumstance, as he was famous movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, but then again another famous movie star, Ronald Reagan, had been elected governor before. And George Murphy had been elected senator. Do you need a certain glam quality to succeed in California politics?
Two Californians have become president, although only one, Nixon, was born in California. A third Californian and second native born Californian has a real good shot right now. We’re rooting for her!
Spantsa / Olive Oatman
Posted: September 14, 2024 Filed under: the American West, the California Condition Leave a comment
OTLTA is a new acronym I’d like to get going. It stands for “one thing led to another.” Here it is in context: OTLA and I’m reading about captivity narratives of the American West. Accounts by white people who were captured or taken in by native tribes.
Captivity narratives are a whole serious category of study for academic historians. I’d fear to get over my skis here. There were commercial and political incentives to make these narratives as lurid as possible. How much to trust any one account is a historical puzzle. But, we love those.
Take for example Olive Oatman. When she was fourteen she was traveling with her family, who were Brewsterites, an splinter group of Mormons. Their intended destination was Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River. On Saturday, March 8, 1851, some eighty miles east of Yuma, they encountered some Yavapai people. (Already we need a footnote: were they really Yavapai? There are papers on this topic.) Everyone in the party was killed except Olive and her younger sister Mary Ann.
The Yavapai kept them but eventually traded them to some Mohave people.
Mary Ann did not survive.
After about four years among the Mohave, the post commander at Fort Yuma, on the California side, heard about a white woman living out there and sent word that he’d like her back.
We pick up the rest from Wikipedia:
Inside the fort, Olive was surrounded by cheering people.
Olive’s childhood friend Susan Thompson, whom she befriended again at this time, stated many years later that she believed Olive was “grieving” upon her forced return because she had been married to a Mohave man and had given birth to two boys.
Olive, however, denied rumors during her lifetime that she either had been married to a Mohave or had been sexually mistreated by the Yavapai or Mohave. In Stratton’s book, she declared that “to the honor of these savages let it be said, they never offered the least unchaste abuse to me.” However, her nickname, Spantsa, may have meant “rotten womb” and implied that she was sexually active, although historians have argued that the name could have different meanings.[5]: 73–74 [19]
from Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres (University of Oklahoma Press), by Deborah and Jon Lawrence, an interview with Margot Mifflin, an associat professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York who also directs the Arts and Cultire program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism (“Her interest in tatoo art let to her work on the life of Olive Oatman.”):
History, getting towards the source, remains an engaging pastime.
I’ve been to a lot of California but I’ve never had the chance to visit Winterhaven, where we’d find the site of Fort Yuma. If I’m there I will surely check out the Museum of History in Granite:
Amazing if in four millennia the United States and the French Foreign Legion are remembered in equal proportion.
(User Kirs10 took that photo of the pyramid)
Conversations with Grant
Posted: September 7, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition, War of the Rebellion Leave a comment
After his Presidency Ulysses Grant took an around the world tour with his wife and the diplomat, librarian and scholar John Russell Young, who took notes on the trip and published them in a book.
The trip as recorded by Young is interesting but much of it was written for an audience that would never travel overseas. It was a ponderous, two-volume tome of over 1,300 pages with 800 engraved illustrations.
The good folks at Big Byte Press have taken the juiciest parts and compiled them into Conversations With Grant. (Note that this version does not include the famous conversation with Bismarck). I could spend a while with their various reprints of historical memoirs for Kindle. What a service. Here are some items we learn:
after the end of the Civil War, Grant wanted to keep going and invade Mexico:
“When our war ended,” said General Grant, “I urged upon President Johnson an immediate invasion of Mexico. I am not sure whether I wrote him or not, but I pressed the matter frequently upon Mr. Johnson and Mr. Seward [Secretary of State, William Seward]. You see, Napoleon in Mexico was really a part, and an active part, of the rebellion. His army was as much opposed to us as that of Kirby Smith. Even apart from his desire to establish a monarchy, and overthrow a friendly republic, against which every loyal American revolted, there was the active co-operation between the French and the rebels on the Rio Grande which made it an act of war. I believed then, and I believe now, that we had a just cause of war with Maximilian, and with Napoleon if he supported him—with Napoleon especially, as he was the head of the whole business. We were so placed that we were bound to fight him. I sent Sheridan off to the Rio Grande. I sent him post haste, not giving him time to participate in the farewell review. My plan was to give him a corps, have him cross the Rio Grande, join Juarez, and attack Maximilian. With his corps he could have walked over Mexico. Mr. Johnson seemed to favor my plan, but Mr. Seward was opposed, and his opposition was decisive.” The remark was made that such a move necessarily meant a war with France. “I suppose so,” said the General. “But with the army that we had on both sides at the close of the war, what did we care for Napoleon? Unless Napoleon surrendered his Mexican project, I was for fighting Napoleon. There never was a more just cause for war than what Napoleon gave us. With our army we could do as we pleased. We had a victorious army, trained in four years of war, and we had the whole South to recruit from. I had that in my mind when I proposed the advance on Mexico. I wanted to employ and occupy the Southern army. We had destroyed the career of many of them at home, and I wanted them to go to Mexico. I am not sure now that I was sound in that conclusion. I have thought that their devotion to slavery and their familiarity with the institution would have led them to introduce slavery, or something like it, into Mexico, which would have been a calamity. Still, my plan at the time was to induce the Southern troops to go to Mexico, to go as soldiers under Sheridan, and remain as settlers. I was especially anxious that Kirby Smith with his command should go over. Kirby Smith had not surrendered, and I was not sure that he would not give us trouble before surrendering. Mexico seemed an outlet for the disappointed and dangerous elements in the South, elements brave and warlike and energetic enough, and with their share of the best qualities of the Anglo-Saxon character, but irreconcilable in their hostility to the Union. As our people had saved the Union and meant to keep it, and manage it as we liked, and not as they liked, it seemed to me that the best place for our defeated friends was Mexico. It was better for them and better for us. I tried to make Lee think so when he surrendered. They would have done perhaps as great a work in Mexico as has been done in California.” It was suggested that Mr. Seward’s objection to attack Napoleon was his dread of another war. The General said: “No one dreaded war more than I did. I had more than I wanted. But the war would have been national, and we could have united both sections under one flag. The good results accruing from that would in themselves have compensated for another war, even if it had come, and such a war as it must have been under Sheridan and his army—short, quick, decisive, and assuredly triumphant. We could have marched from the Rio Grande to Mexico without a serious battle.
although he thought the first Mexican War was bad:
I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.
…The Mexicans are a good people. They live on little and work hard. They suffer from the influence of the Church, which, while I was in Mexico at least, was as bad as could be. The Mexicans were good soldiers, but badly commanded. The country is rich, and if the people could be assured a good government, they would prosper. See what we have made of Texas and California—empires. There are the same materials for new empires in Mexico.
on Napoleon:
Of course the first emperor was a great genius, but one of the most selfish and cruel men in history. Outside of his military skill I do not see a redeeming trait in his character. He abused France for his own ends, and brought incredible disasters upon his country to gratify his selfish ambition I do not think any genius can excuse a crime like that.
He never wanted to go to West Point, or be in the army at all:
was never more delighted at anything,” said the General, “than the close of the war. I never liked service in the army—not as a young officer. I did not want to go to West Point. My appointment was an accident, and my father had to use his authority to make me go. If I could have escaped West Point without bringing myself into disgrace at home, I would have done so. I remember about the time I entered the academy there were debates in Congress over a proposal to abolish West Point. I used to look over the papers, and read the Congress reports with eagerness, to see the progress the bill made, and hoping to hear that the school had been abolished, and that I could go home to my father without being in disgrace. I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm. I was always glad when a battle was over. I never want to command another army. I take no interest in armies. When the Duke of Cambridge asked me to review his troops at Aldershott I told his Royal Highness that the one thing I never wanted to see again was a military parade. When I resigned from the army and went to a farm I was happy.
The Battle of St. Louis was narrowly avoided:
there was some splendid work done in Missouri, and especially in St. Louis, in the earliest days of the war, which people have now almost forgotten. If St. Louis had been captured by the rebels it would have made a vast difference in our war. It would have been a terrible task to have recaptured St. Louis—one of the most difficult that could be given to any military man. Instead of a campaign before Vicksburg, it would have been a campaign before St. Louis.
He loved Oakland, and Yosemite:
The San Francisco that he had known in the early days had vanished, and even the aspect of nature had changed; for the resolute men who are building the metropolis of the Pacific have absorbed the waters and torn down the hills to make their way.
…
Oakland is a suburb of San Francisco, and is certainly one of the most beautiful cities I have seen in my journey around the world.
…
So much has been written about the Yosemite that I venture but one remark: that having seen most of the sights that attract travelers in India, Asia, and Europe, it stands unparalleled as a rapturous vision of beauty and splendor.
He wanted to live in California:
The only promotion that I ever rejoiced in was when I was made major-general in the regular army. I was happy over that, because it made me the junior major-general, and I hoped, when the war was over, that I could live in California. I had been yearning for the opportunity to return to California, and I saw it in that promotion. When I was given a higher command, I was sorry, because it involved a residence in Washington, which, at that time, of all places in the country I disliked, and it dissolved my hopes of a return to the Pacific coast. I came to like Washington, however, when I knew it.
He had some reservations about Lee as a general:
Lee was of a slow, conservative, cautious nature, without imagination or humor, always the same, with grave dignity. I never could see in his achievements what justifies his reputation. The illusion that nothing but heavy odds beat him will not stand the ultimate light of history. I know it is not true. Lee was a good deal of a headquarters general; a desk general, from what I can hear, and from what his officers say. He was almost too old for active service—the best service in the field. At the time of the surrender he was fifty-eight or fifty-nine and I was forty-three. His officers used to say that he posed himself, that he was retiring and exclusive, and that his headquarters were difficult of access. I remember when the commissioners came through our lines to treat, just before the surrender, that one of them remarked on the great difference between our headquarters and Lee’s. I always kept open house at head-quarters, so far as the army was concerned.
On Shiloh:
“No battle,” said General Grant on one occasion, “has been more discussed than Shiloh-none in my career. The correspondents and papers at the time all said that Shiloh was a surprise-that our men were killed over their coffee, and so on.
There was no surprise about it, except,” said the General, with a smile, “perhaps to the newspaper correspondents. We had been skirmishing for two days before we were attacked. At night, when but a small portion of Buell’s army had crossed to the west bank of the Tennessee River, I was so well satisfied with the result, and so certain that I would beat Beauregard, even without Buell’s aid, that I went in person to each division commander and ordered an advance along the line at four in the morning. Shiloh was one of the most important battles in the war. It was there that our Western soldiers first met the enemy in a pitched battle. From that day they never feared to fight the enemy, and never went into action without feeling sure they would win. Shiloh broke the prestige of the Southern Confederacy so far as our Western army was con-cerned. Sherman was the hero of Shiloh.
He really commanded two divisions-his own and McClernand’s-and proved himself to be a consummate soldier. Nothing could be finer than his work at Shiloh, and yet Shiloh was belittled by our Northern people so that many people look at it as a defeat.
Helytimes 
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
